I’m glad for “N Judah Rider” but I also took the N Judah “Express” from 48th Ave. to Downtown today, and it actually took longer for me to get downtown then it usually does on the “non-express” N Judah. In my opinion this bus is a total MUNI fail. Although the stated purpose of the new service is to alleviate congestion on the N, I highly doubt that many folks are going to be waiting on the street for a bus (a block away from the MUNI/BART station) to get on a bus that will take at best just as long, and more likely longer to get out to the sunset. Why don’t they just run more N’s? I live by Ocean Beach and there are regularly between 2 and 4 N Judah trains sitting out there, instead of running the rout.

i do believe their excuse for not running more Ns is that they don’t have enough operators that can drive the LRVs, and they can’t afford to hire more. so they slowly train existing operators, it seems.

however, they don’t really need many more Ns on the track to alleviate at least SOME of the crowding issues they have. all they really have to do is get their drivers to actually follow the fucking schedule that seems to be ignored. i live on the N line, and several times a day i see 2 or 3 Ns go by, all bunched together (running a couple minutes apart). the first train is always packed like a sardine can, and then the one or two trains after it are near-empty (essentially WASTED trains). and then, because they’re all squished together, there’s a MONSTER gap in the schedule, and then next train is packed again. it’s a bad cycle, that’s easily fixed… but no one at muni seems to care.

Bunching is incredibly frustrating, but unfortunately it’s not easily fixed. It’s an active topic of research in the civil and systems engineering community, but so far most of the theory hasn’t made it into practice because of operational limitations. The gist of it is that in any surface-running transit line, any minor disturbance (which will almost surely happen over the course of the day) will propagate throughout the rest of the vehicles in the line, with the end equilibrium being packs of bunched vehicles. The scheduled headway system, even with scheduled control points, is not robust at all and once vehicles fall out of their unstable equilibrium, the line is screwed.